[Part of An Anarcho-Capitalist Case Against Left-Libertarianism series] Contra Rothbard Mention the word "redistribution" to a run-of-the-mill libertarian would usually throw up red flags, and rightfully so. Any government program equates to people spending other people's money. Since taxes are not the product of government labor and voluntary trade, the livelihoods of those who decide how it gets spent (government officials) aren't at risk when it's spent inefficiently or wastefully. Market forces, such as profit and loss, are not present to even a modicum of the same extent as they are with private money. Welfare programs are, therefore, a...

[Part of An Anarcho-Capitalist Case Against Left-Libertarianism series] “Left-libertarianism” has attracted a substantial following within recent years. Many libertarians are unaware of what left-libertarianism is or what it entails, and until recently its nature and scope have remained fuzzy and obscure. To his credit, Nick Ford has recently written an article “14 Questions and Answers on Left-Libertarianism” which helps to clarify (albeit far from perfectly) the nature and scope of this elusive philosophy. His article will be used for the following analysis. Prior to delving into the critique, an explication of the scope of libertarianism is in order. The...

Chartier attempts to help distinguish left-libertarianism as its own brand apart from basic libertarianism by grounding it in values that are uniquely leftist. In this essay, we have sought to show that it the values he fleshes out are not in fact clearly distinguished, and seem to function in name as more of an encoded signal to subvert libertarianism for an implicit agenda.

I have a constant suspicion when talking to the Left that when they seem to be talking about economics, and even if they are talking about it, they’re not so much doing analysis as justifying their ideology.

The libertarian-left have discovered and perfected the technique of couching everything they say in ambiguous terms and then refusing to define those terms. So they can write huge volumes of stuff without actually uttering an actual proposition that can be assessed on its merits – every criticism is an automatic straw man.

It has become common knowledge to today’s college students that possessing a bachelor’s degree is almost worthless in terms of starting a career, particularly outside of highly technical STEM fields. As the image below (ironically brought to my attention because of a share on Facebook by a supporter of Bernie Sanders) shows, there is a common sense that the bachelor’s degree isn’t really worth anything to future employers. This was not always the case. If one asks someone who went to college a few decades ago, the college degree was incredibly important to the start of their career. It signified...

My question to Bernie Sanders supporters: When someone in Bangladesh observes your lifestyle, it seems as incredible to them as that of the 1% seems to you. Why are they not entitled to help themselves to your things, the way you consider yourself morally entitled to help yourself to the goods of the American rich? In your answer, avoid moral irrelevancies like national borders; can we tolerate inequality just because it's cross-border? Extra credit: take a picture of yourself divesting yourself of most of your goods in the name of global equality. -Thomas E. Woods With every election cycle there...

Anarchists (left-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists for the purpose of this discussion) speculate about what a stateless society might look like. That is, if society would trend more towards socialism or capitalism. A number of left-libertarians assert that society would trend towards socialism. Kevin Carson argues this position in his essay “Who Owns the Benefit? The Free Market as Full Communism.” Before beginning the critique, providing a definition of capitalism is in order. “Capitalism" simply refers to that system where all scarce goods (including land and the means of production) are subject to private ownership given they are acquired via original...

When I was fourteen years old, my family took a trip to Germany which was my first excursion outside of the United States. At that age, Dr. Pepper was all I drank, and my parents accommodated this by purchasing me a large case of Dr. Pepper to help me survive. German Dr. Pepper, though, tasted slightly different than that bought in the United States. At age fourteen, this was a mystery to me - just one of many oddities in another country, I assumed. The reality, of course, is that what I was tasting (for the first time) was Dr....

In reading Charles Johnson’s oddly impactful 2008 essay Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin, I was perplexed by the sheer weight of unnecessary confusion and blurring of the language. It is a peculiar thing to see a political theory as clear and simple as libertarianism become suddenly and unnecessarily wrapped up in obscure and ambiguous language. It was almost as if obscurity was the means by which he intentionally sought to redefine the libertarian doctrine. After spending so much of my personal libertarian education deep in the clear and precise works of Hans Hoppe and Murray Rothbard, it was a shock to...